Shape Up US Month on January, 2025: How can I get in shape for soccer in one month?

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How can I get in shape for soccer in one month?

you have 1 month? seems a little late for the team to have tryouts.....also depends on what level of soccer it is.

get yourself running twice a day. in the mornings and evenings. not that you can do it, but you'll want to be able to run 3-5 miles at a constant pace. you can probably start off with running 2-3 miles. also you should do some form of short distance work as well. like sprints. jog 1-2 minutes, full sprint 30-60 seconds.

another exercise is to run while dribbling. do it at a jogging pace, do it at 80% speed.

honestly youre probably going to be tired in the first 30 minutes.

not sure how old you are or what level of play you are going to be trying out for but as a bench mark....

i think when i was in 6th grade I ran a 7 minute mile, and when I was in highschool I ran a 5:40 mile.

is it okay to give my 4 month old rice ceral w/ breastmilk?

is it okay to give my 4 month old rice ceral w/ breastmilk?

All mammals are protected by the same thing -they can't physically eat food until they are physiologically ready to digest it. For humans this means picking up the food, placing it in their mouth, gumming it, moving it back with their tongue, and swallowing it. The most obvious of course it the tongue thrust that newborns have -this reflex actively keeps food out of their body until they can digest it. But the other steps all have safeguards as well.

For healthy, full term infants the ability to eat food develops around 6-9 months. In recent years there have been numerous studies looking at the risks of certain things (allergies, asthma, anemia, etc) in relation to when solids are started and almost all have shown that the lowest risks are when solids are started between 6-9 months.

However it should also be noted that babies with allergies may refuse solids for up to a year, and that breastmilk is nutritionally complete for at least the first year of life despite earlier statements that it is not. An unpleasant feeling in the mouth is often a first sign of allergy and may cause babies to spit out rather than swallow allergenic foods. This is a very useful safeguard that should not be overridden.

What if my 4-5 month old seems developmentally ready for solids?

Four- to five-month-old babies are sometimes very eager to participate at mealtime, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are ready to eat solids - more often it's just the normal developmental urge to do what everyone else is doing. Research studies tell us that there are many health advantages to delaying solids for about 6 months for all babies, not just the babies who are not yet interested in mealtime.

There are a number of things you can do to let baby participate in mealtimes without starting solids:

* Let baby sit with the family at mealtime - in a lap, booster seat or high chair.

* Give baby a cup of water or expressed milk. Your baby can entertain himself at mealtime while learning to use a cup. 1-3 ounces of water in the cup should be plenty (often for the entire day). Many moms choose to use only water or a small amount of breastmilk to avoid wasting the "liquid gold" while baby learns to use the cup.

* Offer baby sips of water from your cup or straw. Even if baby hasn't figured out how to use a straw yet, you can put your straw in water, block the top end of the straw with your finger to trap a little water in the straw, then let baby drink the water from the lower end of the straw (unblock the top end once it's in baby's mouth).

* Offer baby spoons, cups, bowls and other baby-safe eating utensils to play with during mealtime.

* Give baby an ice cube (if it's a baby-safe size & shape) or ice chips to play with.

* Offer baby a momsicle (popsicle made from breastmilk) or slushy frozen breastmilk to eat with a spoon.

The following organizations recommend that all babies be exclusively breastfed (no cereal, juice or any other foods) for the first 6 months of life (not the first 4-6 months):

* World Health Organization

* UNICEF

* US Department of Health & Human Services

* American Academy of Pediatrics

* American Academy of Family Physicians

* American Dietetic Association

* Australian National Health and Medical Research Council

* Royal Australian College of General Practitioners

* Health Canada

It appears that a baby's general development keeps pace with the development of his ability to manage food in his mouth, and to digest it. A baby who is struggling to get food into his mouth is probably not quite ready to eat it.

The babies who participated in the research were allowed to begin at four months. But they were not able to feed themselves before six months. Some of the younger babies picked food up and took it to their mouths; some even chewed it, but none swallowed it. Their own development decided for them when the time was right. Part of the reason for this study was to show (based on a theory of self-feeding) that babies are not ready for solid food before six months. It seems that we have spent all these years working out that six months is the right age and babies have known it all along!

It seems reasonable to predict that if parents choose to provide babies with the opportunity to pick up and eat solid food from birth they will still not be able to do it until around six months. The principle is the same as putting a newborn baby on the floor to play: he is being provided with the opportunity to walk but will not do so until about one year – because his own development stops him. But: everything depends on the baby being in control. Food must not be put into his mouth for him. Since it is very tempting to do this, it is probably safer to recommend that babies should not be given the opportunity to eat solid food before six months.

Many parents worry about babies choking. However, there is good reason to believe that babies are at less risk of choking if they are in control of what goes into their mouth than if they are spoon fed. This is because babies are not capable of intentionally moving food to the back of their throats until after they have learnt to chew. And they do not develop the ability to chew until after they have developed the ability to reach out and grab things. Thus, a very young baby cannot easily put himself at risk because he cannot get the food into his mouth in the first place. On the other hand, the action used to suck food off a spoon tends to take the food straight to the back of the mouth, causing the baby to gag. This means that spoon feeding has its own potential to lead to choking – and makes one wonder about the safety of giving lumpy foods off a spoon.

Why not cereal?

Cereal is not at all necessary, particularly the baby cereals. Regular (whole grain) oatmeal is more nutritious for your baby.

The truth is, there is nothing special about these foods that makes them better to start out with. Babies don't actually even need rice cereal

Meat provides additional protein, zinc, B-vitamins, and other nutrients which may be in short supply when the decrease in breast milk occurs. A recent study from Sweden suggests that when infants are given substantial amounts of cereal, it may lead to low concentrations of zinc and reduced calcium absorption (Persson 1998). Dr. Nancy Krebs has shared preliminary results from a large infant growth study suggesting that breastfed infants who received pureed or strained meat as a primary weaning food beginning at four to five months, grow at a slightly faster rate. Dr. Krebs' premise is that inadequate protein or zinc from complementary foods may limit the growth of some breastfed infants during the weaning period. Both protein and zinc levels were consistently higher in the diets of the infants who received meat (Krebs 1998). Thus the custom of providing large amounts of cereal products and excluding meat products before seven months of age may not meet the nutritional needs of all breastfed infants.

Meat has also been recommended as an excellent source of iron in infancy. Heme iron (the form of iron found in meat) is better absorbed than iron from plant sources. In addition, the protein in meat helps the baby more easily absorb the iron from other foods. Two recent studies (Makrides 1998; Engelmann 1998) have examined iron status in breastfed infants who received meat earlier in the weaning period. These studies indicate that while there is not a measurable change in breastfed babies' iron stores when they receive an increased amount of meat (or iron), the levels of hemoglobin circulating in the blood stream do increase when babies receive meat as one of their first foods.

Finally, respect the tiny, still-developing digestive system of your infant. Babies have limited enzyme production, which is necessary for the digestion of foods. In fact, it takes up to 28 months, just around the time when molar teeth are fully developed, for the big-gun carbohydrate enzymes (namely amylase) to fully kick into gear. Foods like cereals, grains and breads are very challenging for little ones to digest. Thus, these foods should be some of the last to be introduced. (One carbohydrate enzyme a baby's small intestine does produce is lactase, for the digestion of lactose in milk.1)

[...]

Babies do produce functional enzymes (pepsin and proteolytic enzymes) and digestive juices (hydrochloric acid in the stomach) that work on proteins and fats.12 This makes perfect sense since the milk from a healthy mother has 50-60 percent of its energy as fat, which is critical for growth, energy and development.13 In addition, the cholesterol in human milk supplies an infant with close to six times the amount most adults consume from food.13 In some cultures, a new mother is encouraged to eat six to ten eggs a day and almost ten ounces of chicken and pork for at least a month after birth. This fat-rich diet ensures her breast milk will contain adequate healthy fats.14

Thus, a baby's earliest solid foods should be mostly animal foods since his digestive system, although immature, is better equipped to supply enzymes for digestion of fats and proteins rather than carbohydrates.1 This explains why current research is pointing to meat (including nutrient-dense organ meat) as being a nourishing early weaning food.

The results indicate that in a group of healthy, well growing 12-month-old Swedish infants one-quarter is iron-depleted, although iron deficiency anaemia is rare, and one-third may be zinc-depleted. The high cereal intake of Swedish infants from 6 months of age may have limited the bioavailability of both iron and zinc from the diet.

Conclusions: These results confirm that meat as a complementary food for breast-fed infants can provide a rich source of dietary zinc that is well absorbed. The significant positive correlation between zinc intake and exchangeable zinc pool size suggests that increasing zinc intake positively affects metabolically available zinc.

Female body shape - sexually selected?

Female body shape - sexually selected?

At least some parts of the female body shape have been selected by necessity for giving birth to babies with large heads. One of these is specifically a relatively wide pelvis compared to males, and that somewhat wider shape has something to do with the fact that women's hips tend to sway back and forth when we walk more than men's narrower hips do. Men may find this walk sexually attractive, and women may accentuate this characteristic as they are aware of this fact, by wearing tight skirts for example, or by binding their feet as small children so that they'll always have tiny feet as was done in traditional China. But that swaying is there to a certain extent anyway.

The hormones involved in producing a fertile woman -- estrogen and progesterone in the proper balance -- seem to be what cause women to develop breasts and that thicker layer of subcutaneous fat that gives us a softer look than most men have. If we women didn't have the right balance of hormones we would not have those monthly cycles and without those the eggs would not enter the womb at the right time or else they wouldn't enter an environment prepared for implantation, so we couldn't get pregnant or carry a fertilized egg to term as a 9-month old baby. That's one of the reasons why infertile ladies have to take hormones (in the form of pills similar to birth control pills) in order to become pregnant. It's a matter of getting all those internal chemicals in the right balance.

Elaine Morgan, who wrote the book "The Ascent of Woman" and who champions the none-too-popular Aquatic Ape hypothesis, suggests that the basic reason why women have breasts is actually not due to sexual selection, although that has been the main reason proposed by everybody else, so far as I know. Morgan's hypothesis is that our hominid ancestors became bipedal originally when they went into the water to escape from predators, when the trees began to thin out. Imagine an early ape-like being which walks out into a river or lake, say, to avoid a saber-toothed cat. Ms. Proto-Ape-Woman wants to go out as far as possible in order to discourage the hungry cat, so she walks out on her hind feet, standing on two legs rather than going on all fours as a chimpanzee would. Doing this rather a lot, her descendants develop bipedalism. Her descendants also lose their body hair which makes them look unlike modern apes, at the same time acquiring that layer of fat under the skin which otherwise doesn't have a very good explanation. This makes her something like some other aquatic mammals, like porpoises, whales, seals, sea lions, and sea cows, all of which entered the water and lost original fur coats (presumably). All of these also got pretty fat.

Now, periodically Ms. Proto-Ape-Lady comes ashore to nurse her infant, sitting on a rock. She's sitting upright, looking for that saber-toothed cat. The baby is lying in her lap, with its little head resting in the crook of her elbow. If she only has teats like a dog (or chimp), the baby had better be able to lift its little noggin to the teat, because the nipple won't be placed properly for the baby to lie down and suckle at the same time. For a chimp this is not an issue, because the infant can hang onto mama with all four "hands" (hands and feet). But once a proto-hominid begins to evolve toward bipedalism, that's not so easy for Ms. Proto-Ape-Lady's baby. The feet don't hang on very well. So either mama has to do some of the work. Or the breast needs to do something. Morgan surmises that the breast as a fleshy object which hangs down toward baby's mouth evolved along with bipedalism. She did not know about pygmy chimpanzees (also known as bonobos). But these apes, which are actually only slightly smaller than regular chimps, actually have the beginning of a developed breast, more so than Pan troglodytes (they are also known as Pan paniscus).

And my personal thoughts on the subject are that Morgan has something there and that the human nose evolved right along with the breast. Because if a baby is suckling at a fleshy breast, it needs something to keep all that flesh from covering its little nostrils up with. A little button of a nose is all that's necessary (noted from observation of nursing babies), so this probably appeared even in Australopithecus afarensis et al, even though no large, bony nose had yet appeared.

I once read that the reason that human women have fleshy lips is due to bipedalism, indirectly, and sexual selection, more directly. Due to bipedalism, human female genitalia gets directed downward between the legs instead of straight back the way a chimp female's genitalia stand out (or a gorilla's or an orangutan's do). So, to compensate, the lips of the human (or probably, earlier, the australopithecine) female's facial lips began to become more prominent and redder as a sort of compensation. It seems to me, however, that there is a major flaw in this sort of reasoning. That

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